Random news and thoughts about various two-wheeled projects and music, especially my band, Skull Full Of Blues.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Friday Fun

On Friday, Steve, Carol and I tooled around town on our bikes for about 6 hours. We were dropping off tickets to the show, and hanging posters, and just generally having fun on bikes.

Eric Chavez, at work, Photoshopped Steve and me into the Easy Rider picture, and emailed it to me, the other day. So, I redid the poster for the fourth (and final) time. I think it's great. I love the obviousness of the 'shop, and I think it might be good to have our faces on the poster so that people might realize that SFOB is us (especially at the coffee shop, and other places where people know us by sight).

Right in the middle of the ride, the derailleur on Carol's road bike suddenly pulled up into the chain and locked up the cranks. I took a look at it, and saw that the tab through which the B-tension screw runs had snapped off.

Carol's broken derailleur...

An unbroken derailleur, for comparison...

The B-tension screw adjusts the distance that the top pulley of the derailleur maintains from the cog. This allows you to set the derailleur as close to the cogs as possible (for crisp shifting), without having the pulley touch the cog. Luckily, the bike was still rideable, even though the pulley was, indeed, touching the cogs, and we finished out the day with no real problems.

But, since Carol is riding that bike in the MS-150, next Saturday, I needed to get the derailleur replaced. It is a late-90s Campagnolo, and, while I should be able to get the part to fix it, I knew that I would not be able to do so before next weekend. So, I took the rear derailleur off of Carol's old commuter, and replaced the broken unit on her road bike.

She has my XO-2 on "permanent loan", and uses it as her commuter, now. So the old commuter is destined to give up its parts to another project, anyway.

We ended up with 25 miles of stop-n-go riding for the day, met some new friends and, hopefully, gained some audience members for our upcoming show, all at the same time.